"No, sir. You can tell me about it if it's something you think she was wearing. Perhaps it will turn up in the investigation."

"She never took it off, from the day her grandmother died four years ago. My father was a West Point man, Ms. Cooper. Graduated in 1943. The cadets all had rings back in those days. That's the USMA emblem." Huff held out his hand to me to show me the writing on his father's ring, a thick gold setting with a yellow stone. "Mine's a citrine, like hers, only larger. When the men became engaged, they had identical ones made for their fiancées-miniatures, of course. Elise wouldn't go anywhere without her ring."

"I'll add that to the report. We'll certainly return it to you when we find it." I wasn't hopeful that it would ever surface in the Brooklyn marshland.

He removed a pair of hoop earrings, a cameo pin, and a thin gold necklace from his pocket and cupped them in his hands. "Not much to go back home with, is it? Her little sister's going to want these things.

She worships Elise."

"I'm sure she has good reason to do that."

"I'd like to know why I can't talk to Barbara again," Huff said, adopting a more businesslike tone. I guessed him to be in his early fifties-with red hair the color of his daughter's-although the fact that he hadn't slept in a week made him appear older.

"It's important that we get some information from her first," Mike said.

"I think you've had your chance to do that, Detective."

"She wasn't honest with you or your wife, either."

I had met with Barbara Gould for an interview when Battaglia first assigned me the case. She repeated to me then that she had called the Huffs at the end of the preceding weekend. She told them, and then the police, that she and Elise had gone out drinking after work. But she lied about the time of night they parted company, where she last saw Elise, and how intoxicated both young women were.

"Barbara's like my own child," Huff said, dismissing Mike completely. "She'd never lie to us."

"Well, we're going to try to find out why she did."

"I spoke to the captain tonight, before he left," Huff said, getting up from the desk and walking to look at the pegboard wall behind him, which was covered from floor to ceiling with artists' sketches and mug shots of wanted perps. "He told me about another girl-another body found somewhere downtown this week.

"Tell me, Detective," he said as he turned back to Mike. "You don't think these two cases are connected, do you?"

Mike brushed back his hair with his hand. "Too early to say. More likely just a coincidence that-"

"Good. Because I don't expect my baby had anything to do with a man who was killing whores. Do you understand that, Mr. Chapman? Elise is-Elise was a good girl, and I don't want the Huff name mixed up in that other woman's business."

"We don't spend a whole lotta time blaming our victims, Mr. Huff,"

Mike said. "We just leave that to the newspapers. Are you comfortable here while Alex and I have another run at Barbara?"

He slumped back down into the chair. "I want answers, Detective.

I've got our congressman putting some heat on y'all. I expect results.

I'm expecting you to solve this damn thing quickly. My wife and I would like some closure. And we'd like it soon."

"Closure," Mike said, shutting the door behind us. "Closure is the most bullshit word in the English language. I'll find this beast and you'll send him up the river for the rest of his life. The day of the verdict, Huff will have that short-lived rush of happiness that comes with a homicide conviction. Some news jock will stick a microphone in his face on the courthouse steps and ask how he feels about the conviction and he'll tell them it's great and now he's got closure. Next day he and the missus will wake up and realize their kid is still dead. There's no such thing as closure when you lose someone you love to a murderer."

I knew that, too, and it was part of the reason it was so much more satisfying for me to work with survivors of sexual assault, who never forgot what happened to them but were most often able to move on with their lives.

"Heads, you can be the good cop," Mike said.

"Not a contest. I want another shot at her."

"Bad cop it is. This kid doesn't know yet what it's like to be in your crosshairs, Coop."

Barbara Gould was in the small cubicle used by the Twentieth Precinct detective squad for interrogations. It held a table and four chairs, and the walls were completely bare. Her head was resting on her forearms until she picked it up when we entered the room. "Hello, again," I said.

"Hello. Look, Detective, if you give me back my cell, I've got to be going now. It's almost nine o'clock and I've got a lot of stuff to do." The twenty-year-old had practiced her pout well. The moment she recognized me, she put it on and began to pull and twist a strand of her long brown hair around her forefinger.

"Ms. Cooper needs to talk to you," Mike said, leaning back against the door.

"We've had that conversation."

"And now we're going to have it once more. Only this time you're going to tell me the truth."

"I tried to tell Mr. Huff. So I was wrong the first time," Barbara said, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling and clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "What happens if I leave? Can I just go now?"

"No, you can't leave."

I had no authority to keep the petulant young woman in the station house, but she accepted my answer and didn't move from her seat.

I started, calmly, to go through the story she had told me originally. "We're going to start over, Barbara, from the time you and Elise left your apartment."

Two years younger than Elise, Barbara had come to New York first and was about to enter her junior year at Marymount College. Elise had finished college in Tennessee and landed a job working at La Guardia Airport as a counter agent for Jet Blue.

The first part of the story was consistent with what she had told me a week earlier. Elise had come home from work at seven, and after eating a light supper together they went out to meet friends. Barbara was dressed in leggings and a tube top, and Elise had kept on the navy blue pants and crisp white short-sleeved uniform shirt-complete with small gold wings on the collar-that she wore at work. She liked to do that, Barbara had said with a laugh when she first talked to me about Elise, because guys often took her for a flight attendant.

"What time did you leave your apartment?"

"I don't know. Around eleven, I guess. Between eleven and twelve."

What passed for closing time in many other parts of the country was the hour at which Manhattan's cosmopolitan young ladies set out to meet guys.

"Where did you go?"

Barbara looked over my head at Mike, still twisting her hair. "I told you."

"Tell me again." I needed to know how much of the original story was true.

"Gleason's, over on Columbus. Just around the corner from our apartment."

"What did you have to drink?"

"White wine." She had surrendered her fake ID to me when I first met her. It was a forged driver's license, readily available almost everywhere in the Manhattan bar scene.

"The same for Elise?"

"Yeah."

"How many glasses?"

"Two. We each bought a round, and then some guy was hitting on me. He bought us the third drink. But we hardly touched them."

"I wish I could get a refund for every glass of wine a witness tells me she ordered but never touched," Mike said. "Eight bucks a pop, I could retire tomorrow."

"Did you see anyone else you knew?"

Barbara thought for a few seconds. "No."

"How long did you stay there?"

She rolled her eyes again. "I'm not sure. It's like more than a week already."

"And your friend Elise is dead. Mike and I need a timeline for everything she did that night. I'm not asking you about ancient history, Barbara. Think hard."